Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Enterprise Identity Trends

I have been working with/in/for enterprise (!) identity management (IdM) for the past 4 years or so. What I noticed from recent developments and discussions with partners and customers is:

The market is now moving from a vendors to consultants and integrators. They finally got it. And the enterprises as well. We are no longer discussing whether Sun or Novell or Oracle are better, and which to deploy, but customers now first try to identify what their organizational needs are and pick a tool afterwards.

The focus is moving (right now) from pure user provisioning to a more full identity management including role management. See the recent acquisitions from Sun (Vaau) and Oracle (Bridgestream)

This means that the tool market will become “ commoditized”:Customers can now (see bullet 1.) focus on the higher layers first, while having the confidence that later they will be able to implement that on any on the top tools (Sun, Novell, Oracle, ...).